tawny grammar

The razor's edge

steve — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:56:53 GMT

In their heavy beards and black garb — worn to signify their death to the world — the monks seem to recede into a Byzantine fresco, an ageless brotherhood of ritual, acute simplicity, and constant worship, but also imperfection. There is an awareness, as one elder puts it, that “even on Mount Athos we are humans walking every day on the razor’s edge.”

@ National Geographic (via)

A last death

steve — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:37:59 GMT

And how different could it be when the death was a last death? Say an individual was the very last of its kind. Say it was small — one of the kangaroo rats for instance — and ran from a young fox through a hardscrabble field, towering clouds casting long shadows over the grass. The run lasted a few seconds only; no one was watching, no one at all because there was no one for miles around, no one but insects and worms and a jet passing high overhead. Say neither of them knew either, the fox or the rat, that the rat was the last, that no rat like him would ever be born again. Was it different then? Did the world feel the loss?

The field stayed as a field, the sky remained blue. Any pause that occurred as the action unfurled, any split-second shifting of the vast tableau would have to be imagined by an onlooker who did not exist. The fox started to run again, looking for his next quarry since the last animal had been barely a mouthful.

And yet a particular way of existence was gone, a whole volume in the library of being. Others were sure to fall afterward — a long fly with iridescent wings that lived only in the nest of this single rat, say; a parasite that lived under the wing of the fly; a flowering plant whose roots were nourished by the larval phase of the parasite; a bat that pollinated the plant… it was time that would show the loss, only time that would show how the world had been stripped of its mysteries, stripped by the hundreds and thousands and millions. Remaining would be only the pigeons and the raccoons.

~ Lydia Millet, How The Dead Dream

The Future of Environmental Essay

steve — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:46:21 GMT

Now dressed in full nature writing regalia — spear in hand and animal pelts on — I am finally ready to do battle. I am ready to leave behind the effete fear that politics will somehow taint my work, to understand that this exclusion is mere fashion, and that fashions change. I am also ready to leave behind the nature writer’s sense of impotence. What I want to carry into the fight is humor, irony and the personal essayist’s recourse to the testing ground of self. What I want to leave behind is “Oh, how lovely!” while what I want to carry into the fight are the moments — often lovely moments, yes — when I am briefly outside of myself, moments that remind me of how multifarious and delightful this world still is and that speak to my own animal wildness. What I want to leave behind is false romanticism. What I want to carry into the fight is the original romantic urge for the specific, the local, the real. What I want to leave behind is quoting Thoreau; what I want instead is to follow more deeply the complex spirit of the man. What I want to leave behind are pages of facts. What I want to carry forward are facts marshaled for purpose, facts enlivened because they follow an idea. What I want to leave behind is the sanctimony of quietude and order and “being in the present.” What I want to embrace is loud and wild disorder, growing this way and that, lush and overdone. What I want to leave behind is the virtuous and the good, and move toward the inspiring and great. And while we’re at it I want to leave behind anything false, false to me that is, false to what I feel is my experience on this Earth. What I want instead is to wade through the mess of life without ever reaching for a life ring called The Answer.

~ David Gessner @ Terrain

The science of being distant

steve — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:15:14 GMT

That’s what he called himself, once, the summer he left for the war, and I’d laughed. Glaciologist. I’d never heard the word before. I’d never considered there might be others like him, scientists who studied only glaciers. I thought he was the one man on earth who bothered that much with them, that this science was his alone, that he had invented it. Arcturology. The science of being distant, and receding a little every year.

~ Thomas Wharton, Icefields

The Cold War's Last Prisoner

steve — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:25:08 GMT

The fence is long gone, and the no-man’s land where it stood now is part of Europe’s biggest nature preserve. The once-deadly border area is alive with songbirds nesting in crumbling watchtowers, foxes hiding in weedy fortifications and animals not seen here for years, such as elk and lynx.

But one species is boycotting the reunified animal kingdom: red deer. Herds of them roam both sides of the old NATO-Warsaw Pact border here but mysteriously turn around when they approach it. This although the deer alive today have no memory of the ominous fence.

@ Wall Street Journal (via Hawk & Handsaw)